Birches at Sunrise
I snapped the above picture of white birches at sunrise from our back deck
earlier in the spring before the leaves had budded on the trees.

Storm Clouds Over the Mountains
The second picture was taken more recently as I watched storm clouds move across
the mountains. Sometimes it's just plain scary up here. The flash of white is
only the reflection of the camera light off the glass in our front porch.

I had a good short trip to California last
week. There's not much else that's new to report. I took Erika down to the
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center for some tests (not related to her spine
surgeries) and will take her down again for two days of more testing this week.
I will report her results when we have some results to report. It really is
handy having such a great medical center less than an hour away.

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available
free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

This week in the magazine, Jon Lee
Anderson writes about the effort to eradicate opium in Afghanistan. Here is a
portfolio of images by Aaron Huey, taken when Huey and Anderson accompanied the
Afghan Eradication Force (A.E.F.) on a mission in Uruzgan Province, a region in
central Afghanistan largely controlled by the Taliban
"In the Opium Den Slide Show," The New Yorker, July 9, 2007 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/07/09/slideshow_070709_anderson

The job market turned in a solid performance in
June, suggesting the economy is solid enough to further diminish the chances of
an interest rate cut. The job market's solid performance in June, along with
recent signs of vigor in manufacturing and a buoyant stock market, suggest the
U.S. economy is entering the second half with considerable steam despite
nervousness on Wall Street about cracks in the credit markets and woes in
housing.Brian Blackstone, The Wall Street
Journal, July 7, 2007 ---
Click Here

I hope George Bush is made aware that this discovery took place in Canada
and not the U.S.A startling discovery on the development of human
embryonic stem cells by scientists at McMaster University will change how future
research in the area is done. "Researchers discover human embryonic stem cells are the
ultimate perpetual fuel cell," PhysOrg, July 11, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news103381389.html

Six months on, the country isn't much impressed.
Congress's approval rating is drifting into the netherworld, having sunk to an
average of 25%. One recent Gallup poll reported only 14% of Americans profess
confidence in that institution, now run by Democrats. The numbers make even
President Bush look good, an extraordinary achievement. Kimberley A. Strassel, "Anger
Mismanagement: Congress discovers there's not much gain in Bush hatred," The
Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2007 ---
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrasselpw/?id=110010303

Jackie Kennedy was distraught at the nature of
Oswald's political identity. Her husband, she said, "didn't even have the
satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. . . . It had to be some silly
little communist. It even robs his death of meaning." Fred Siegel, "The True Politics of
the Paranoid Style: American liberals took leave of reason after JFK's
murder," The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, July 12, 2007 --- Click
Here Jensen Comment
What Jackie meant was that the murder of JFK would've meant more if a dastardly
capitalist red neck had done the deed.

As high as gas prices are, milk is more expensive.
And the high prices for both can be traced to the high cost of another commodity
— corn. Both the fuel and grain needed to run a dairy come from corn, which is
getting more expensive because of increased demand for corn's other use,
ethanol. Sarah McCammon, NPR, July 14,
2007 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11980712

As someone with a vivid memory of Kennedy's brief
and lackluster term as president, I have been amused over the following 44 years
to watch the myth of the greatness of John F. Kennedy grow. Here was a president
who initiated no impressive programs, was less than notably courageous in coming
to the aid of civil-rights workers in the South, got the nation enmeshed in one
of the most unpopular wars in our history (Vietnam), and brought it to the edge
of nuclear war in a probably unnecessary war of nerves with Nikita Khrushchev
over the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In short, John F. Kennedy was
a president who, based on the decisions he made or didn't have the courage to
make while in office, deserves to go down as one of the resoundingly mediocre
figures in American presidential history. Joseph Epstein, "Sham-a-Lot," The
Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2007; Page A14 ---
Click Here

The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices
as well as the greatest virtues.René Descartes ---
Click Here

To find a friend one must close one eye - to keep
him, two.Norman Douglas ---
Click Here

Ambrose Bierce was once described as “the forgotten
brother of Mark Twain,” perhaps because he echoed Twain’s view that “Irreverence
is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.” Because of his way with
words, “Public figures quaked in fear of his satirical pen.” Bierce is best
remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of satirical definitions
skewering society. Since political behavior has not exactly improved since he
wrote, and American’s are already being bombarded with the earlier than ever
start to 2008 campaigns, it is worth revisiting what Bierce’s “classic
curmudgeon’s bible” has to say about “the form of government where everyone gets
what the majority deserves.” Gary Galles, "Ambrose Bierce on Politics," The Mises Economics Blog,
July 6, 2007 ---
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006818.asp

Katrina Was a Perfect Storm and George Bush was a Perfect Patsy: Harvesting the Bounty of Disaster"Federal agents investigating widespread fraud after
the Gulf Coast hurricanes in 2005 are sifting through more than 11,000 potential
cases, a backlog that could take years to resolve," reports USA Today.
"Authorities have fielded so many reports of people cheating aid programs,
swindling contracts and scamming charities after the hurricanes that Homeland
Security inspectors, who typically police disaster aid scams, have been
'swamped,' says David Dugas, the U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge." Cato Institute, July 6, 2007 ---
http://www.cato.org/view_ddispatch.php?viewdate=20070706

An enduring myth about farm subsidies is that they
go to needy family farms. But in reality, price supports have accelerated the
demise of small farms because the benefits go to the most profitable growers,
says the Wall Street Journal. According to Citizens Against Government Waste: --
Three-quarters of the payments under the 2002 farm bill have gone to the richest
10 percent of farmers. -- More than half of the $1.9 billion sugar program lines
the pockets of the wealthiest 1 percent of plantation owners. "Farming for Dollars," National Center for Policy Analysis,
July 6, 2007 ---
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=14735

It's been more than six months since the U.S. first
shone a light on the corruption in the United Nations Development Program in
North Korea -- a scandal potentially involving tens of millions of dollars used
to help prop up the nuclear-armed regime of one of the world's most dangerous
dictators. But never mind. It's all a Bush administration plot . . . A
preliminary report by U.N. auditors, issued last month, confirms massive
violations of U.N. rules regarding hiring practices, the use of foreign
currency, and inspections of U.N.-funded projects. In a series of interviews in
New York, Mr. Shkurtaj says the auditors (who were barred by North Korea from
going there) barely scratched the surface of the misconduct. Melanie Kirkpatrick, "A
Whistleblower's Tale," The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2007; Page A9 ---
Click Here

Hundreds of joyful mourners formed an unconventional
funeral procession in Detroit this week as the NAACP officially “buried” the “n
word.” “Today, we’re not just burying the n word, we’re taking it out of our
spirit,” announced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. “Die, n word, and we don’t
want to see you ‘round here no more.” Michigan Democrat Governor Jennifer
Granholm bade “good riddance to this vestige of slavery and racism and... hello
to a new country that invests in all its people.” Patriot Post, July 13, 2007 ---
http://archive.patriotpost.us/pub/07-28_Digest/page-5.php
Jensen Comment
Now if RAP singers would just let the word die we might be able to let the dead
rest in peace.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to
save a man from the vexation of thinking.Ralph Waldo Emerson ---
Click Here

The forty per cent of the American electorate who
regard themselves as Independents would also benefit (if NYC's
billionaire mayor ran for president). Their number has
been growing in recent years, and they are increasingly joined in political
sympathy by Republicans and Democrats who find their parties captive to a base,
fringe, or interest group with which they have little in common. We are living
through one of those recurring moments—1912, 1980, and 1992 were others—when
disgust with the two big parties stirs a longing for an outsider of upright
character, untainted by dirty money or political dealmaking. (Barack Obama and
Giuliani are trying with some success to play the role from inside the parties,
which might encourage Bloomberg to stay out.) This longing is almost always
based on the illusion that compromise is separable from power, that political
innocence should be the main qualification for office. The candidates Eugene
Debs, John Anderson, and Ross Perot would probably not be remembered as stellar
Presidents, but they forced both the Democrats and the Republicans to take
public disillusionment more seriously. Bloomberg’s candidacy as a plain-speaking
manager—and one who is socially liberal, fiscally competent, and temperamentally
reassuring—would appeal to the millions of voters who are heartily sick of the
spectacle of the permanent American campaign. George Packer, "Mr. Independent,"
The New Yorker, July 2, 2007 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/07/02/070702taco_talk_packer

The New York Times: Two Papers in One! (As noted in the Opinion
Journal, on July 10, 2007)Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American
commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight
against extremists linked to Al Qaeda. . . . The deal has all but ended the
fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the
war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.--
New York Times, July 8 --- Click
HereIt is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without
any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit. . . .
Milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq
or a path for withdrawal. . . . Whatever [President's Bush's] cause was, it is
lost. . . . Keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.
Editorial, New York Times, July 8 ---
Click Here
Also see
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-07-12vdh.htmlJensen Comment
We have to wonder whether the Editor of the NYT reads anything printed in the
NYT that is not anti-war and/or pro-liberal. There is not one single bit of
evidence to the contrary in NYT editorials.

The latest from the campaign trail of Obama
"Shift Troops to Fight al-Qaida": "We cannot win a war against the terrorists if
we're on the wrong battlefield," Obama said. "America must urgently begin
deploying from Iraq and take the fight more effectively to the enemy's home by
destroying al-Qaida's leadership along the Afghan-Pakistan border, eliminating
their command and control networks and disrupting their funding.""Clueless," Powerline, July 14, 2007 ---
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/018232.php
Jensen Comment
While Commander and Chief Obama's U.S. military is "deploying form Iraq ...
[to]... the Afghan-Pakistan border," the al-Qaida's top leaders will deploy from
Pakistan to the vacated Iraq. To carry the fight to those warring leaders,
Obama's military will then have to re-invade Iraq or give terrorism's command a
safe haven. What will Commander and Chief Obama do if the new battlefield in
fact becomes Iraq? Much depends upon how much terror the U.S. and its allies
will tolerate before re-invading Iraq. Many anti-war protesters hope that if we
give al-Qaida 80% of the world's oil reserves (which means give them the entire
Middle East) that they will become capitalists dependent upon a safer world to
buy their oil. I think "clueless" is a good word here for the strategy to pull
completely out of Iraq and shift the theatre of war to the Afghan-Pakistan
border. Of course we are and will continue to be worried about Pakistan, because
Pakistan is a major nuclear power teetering on the brink of control by Islamic
militants. If al-Qaida and its sympathizers get control of a
nuclear arsenal in Pakistan or Iraq, "someone will set the
spark off and we will all be blown away."

They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in
Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans.
The Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the
Dutch and I don't like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud for man's been endowed with a
mushroom shaped cloud. And we know for certain that some lovely day someone will
set the spark off and we will all be blown away. They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man. Kingston Trio, 1959 ---
http://www.kingstontrio.com/

It appears that al-Qaeda can be marginalized in Iraq if
the U.S. does not succumb to pressures of the Democratic Party to abandon Iraq
US Army and Iraqis Celebrating victory over al-Qaeda in Anbar
Province ---
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=74e_1184266513

Most of the Sunni-led Arab states are alarmed. They
worry that Assad's behavior in Iraq might bring about a full-scale Sunni-Shiite
confrontation that could swallow up the region. The alliance with Shiite Iran is
of particular concern, since it poses a direct threat to regimes in the Gulf
that have suppressed their Shiite minorities. The actions of Hamas and
Hezbollah, by complicating prospects for a negotiated settlement with Israel,
have obliged most Arab states to contemplate more decades of conflict between
Israelis and Palestinians. Their regimes may not be able to survive this if the
outcome is a general revitalization of militancy in the region, particularly
Islamist militancy, that would target them first.Michael Young, "When Dictators
Dictate Why do Arab thugs always get away with murder?" Reason Magazine, July 6,
2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121205.html

1. Announce that the US will end the occupation,
close the military bases, and withdraw (from Iraq).
9. Assure the political sovereignty of Iraq and making sure that their oil isn't
stolen. Dennis John Kucinich, "Plan for
Iraq" ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
Has anybody asked Kucinich how Point 9 is accomplished after Point 1 transpires?
What happens if and when al-Qaida's top leaders or Iran take over in Iraq
and "steal the oil." Somehow I cannot visualize Commander and Chief Kucinich
rescuing the oil for the terrorized Iraqi people. Just how hard will Iran and
al-Qaida fight each other for Iraq's oil? Actually the outcome may moot
whoever is victorious since both sides will be Islamic militants bent on
defeating Western freedoms, economies, and culture.

Should a human rights center at the nation's most
prestigious university (Harvard University) be collaborating with the
top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the
current military surge?Tom Hayden, "Harvard's Humanitarian
Hawks," The Nation, July 14, 2007 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hayden
Jensen Comment
It really stabs leftists in the heart when note humanitarian scholars in academe
see benefits of not just surrendering in Iraq and abandoning ship as advocated
by virtually all members of the Democratic Party and more extreme pacifist
activists.

Our organization (Iraq
and Afghanistan Veterans of America ) was shocked
and extremely disappointed by the tactics and low standards demonstrated by The
Nation in the writing of this article. The men and women quoted in this article
bravely spoke out precisely because they were concerned about the war and its
effects on all people in Iraq--military or civilian. Like honorable military
service, solid journalism requires an extremely high level of integrity and
professionalism. This article is journalism at its worst. The veterans quoted
trusted The Nation, and that trust was betrayed. Our members put themselves and
their families at tremendous risk by choosing to participate in this article.
But that is for each of them to worry about now. And The Nation has a
sensational story that is sure to gain significant attention and sell numerous
copies."A Letter from IAVA," The Nation, July 13, 2007
---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/veteran
Jensen Comment
To their credit, the highly liberal-leaning editors of The Nation
published this criticism of themselves. Not to their credit is the non-academic
way in which they one-sidedly cherry picked the quotations from these war
veterans ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/editors

Up to now, autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and much
of the Arab world have demonized Israel in order to consolidate their own
diplomatic and domestic power. Hamas's coup has changed the game. Suddenly, the
autocrats realize that should Israel be defeated, the West Bank would fall to
Hamas, helping revolutionary Iran secure its hold on the region while slicing in
half the entire Sunni Middle East. The clock is ticking. Hamas does not have
much time, which means Fatah does not have much time either. Suppose, however,
as all the polls have been saying for years, that ordinary West Bank
Palestinians in fact favor peace with Israel so long as the Arab notables -- in
Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and particularly Saudi Arabia -- bless the terms of the
peace. Suppose, too, that despite its congenital inability in past situations to
sort out the "logic of hope," today's Palestinian leadership has the Sadat-like
cunning to sort out the present situation's "logic of power." Finally, suppose
the Europeans -- especially now under the leadership of Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela
Merkel and Gordon Brown -- suspended their appeasement of their former colonies
and attended to the Sino-Russian-Iranian oil cartel building up against them and
their energy supplies.Sarah Kass, "Peace Paradox," The
Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007 ---
Click Here

Living as we do now afloat the incoming and outgoing
tides of media, perhaps the aborted London and Glasgow car bombings of a
fortnight ago are worth another thought before these attempted mass murders
drift away on the sea of bad memories. What about those doctors? The apparent
complicity of UK-resident Muslim physicians in the attempted murder of innocent
British civilians had many in the West asking why. The short answer is that
these trained MDs somehow convinced themselves that these British people didn't
deserve to live -- that it would be morally good to kill them. That's insane.
Why would they think that? The best answer I have seen in a long time is found
in a new study of Islamic media propaganda by a research team from Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty. "Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas" by
Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo (with Radio Free Iraq correspondents, two of
whom were abducted and murdered this year) is an astounding compilation of the
high-tech methods being used by the insurgency in Iraq to propagate
the ideology of the Islamic jihadist movement. This is the blogosphere for
killers. Daniel Henninger, "The Blogosphere
for Killers," The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2007; Page A14 ---
Click Here

WHEN it comes to economic decisions, there are
always trade-offs. Gain one thing and you lose something else. This is
particularly true in health care, a market in which a scarce good is
ridiculously expensive, but needed by everybody. Kurt Loder, the film critic who
is best known as the anchor of “MTV News,” wrote a scathing critique of the film
for MTV’s Web site . . . But the film as a whole, he concluded, is
“breathtakingly meretricious,” in large part because of its characterizations of
other countries’ health care systems (mtv.com). When “governments attempt to
regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited
demand for it, they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment,” Mr. Loder
asserted. He ticked off a number of negative anecdotes and statistics to counter
the positive ones offered by Mr. Moore. Mr. Loder cited the short film “Dead
Meat,” which presents anecdotes of failure in the Canadian single-payer system.
In its one-sidedness, “Dead Meat” (available online at
onthefencefilms.com) might have made for a
nice double feature with “Sicko,” and left moviegoers with a more complete
understanding of the complications of deciding on a health care system. Dan Mitchell quoting Kurt
Loder,"What’s Lacking in ‘Sicko’," The New York Times, July 7, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/business/07online.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Constitution doesn't explicitly give Congress
the power to issue subpoenas or contempt citations. The Supreme Court has upheld
the practice since first ruling on the issue in 1821. Anyone who is cited for
contempt of Congress faces a year in prison and a fine of as much as $1,000.
Congress last passed contempt charges in 1983. Executive privilege isn't
mentioned in the Constitution. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson invoked
the privilege during their administrations, arguing that it was part of the
separation of powers.Nick Timiraos, "Battle Brews Over
Executive Privilege," The Wall Street Journal, By NICK TIMIRAOS July 7,
2007; Page A5 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
I'm puzzled by the Democratic Party's concerted effort to end or greatly
restrict the President's Executive Privilege custom when in fact Democrats have
a terrific chance of winning the presidency in 2008. Some precedents have to be
lived with for a very, very long time. This could also backfire in an eventual
Supreme Court decision to limit subpoena power and contempt citations in
Congress. The timing of the current fight instigated by Congress sounds entirely
stupid at this time.

On September 3, 2004, a nine-member officer's panel
at Fort Lewis, Washington, found Specialist Ryan G. Anderson guilty of five
counts of seeking to aid the enemy during a time of war and attempted espionage.
The court martial subsequently sentenced him to five concurrent life terms for
his crimes. To date, the sentence represents the most severe penalty meted out
to a U.S. citizen in President George W. Bush's global war on terror. The case
also marked the triumph of the new field of cyber counterterrorism, which I
helped develop. Working from my home computer, I enabled Anderson's capture.
There have since been more than 200 other cases although many of these were
intelligence cases that, for various reasons, did not result in criminal
prosecution. Shannen Rossmiller, "My Cyber
Counter-jihad," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2007 ---
http://www.meforum.org/article/1711

When long-defiant former state Sen. Kathryn Bowers
finally admits as expected Monday to taking bribes, the once-improbable
Tennessee Waltz will have all but played out. She will become the 11th of 12
defendants in the FBI's undercover Waltz corruption sting to be found guilty.
After Bowers, only one minor defendant remains, a former school board member.
Prosecutors are undefeated -- 11-0 -- and they've scored victories against some
of the biggest names in Tennessee politics. From Memphis powerhouse John Ford to
his venerable East Tennessee colleague Ward Crutchfield and former Shelby County
Commissioner Michael Hooks -- heir to the one... Marc Perrusquia, "Federal sting sent official message: Old political ways no
longer work," Memphis Commercial Appeal, July 14, 2007 ---
http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/local/article/0,2845,MCA_25340_5628858,00.html

Over 50 Iranian economists bluntly told President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a face-to-face meeting this week his economic policies
were ‘inexpert’ and lacked ‘any basis in science’, the press reported Saturday.
At the meeting, arranged so the president could hear their criticism, the
economists launched a withering attack on Ahmadinejad’s government which they
said was frittering away the benefits of unprecedented oil wealth. ‘In your
government, economic policies are adopted without any basis in science or the
directives of the fourth development plan,’ said a statement from the 57
economists read out at the start of Friday’s meeting, the... "Iran economists lash out at Ahmadinejad policies," Khaleej
Times, July 14, 2007 ---
Click Here

Consider the (New Mexico)
state's general fund, that portion of the budget over which the governor and the
legislature have the most control. This year it hit $5.6 billion, up $1.5
billion since Mr. Richardson took office in 2003. The governor asked for and
received an 11% increase in spending this year, the biggest jump in memory,
outstripping inflation and population growth in the state. Paul J. Gessing, "Richardson's Santa
Fe Line," The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2007; Page A6 ---
Click Here

In light of President Bush's latest comments on
Iraq, few residents of Baghdad seem to share the president's optimism about the
prospects of success, but many say a premature pullout of U.S. forces would lead
to disaster. Jamie Tarabay, NPR, July 1,
2007 ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11959144

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen.
Peter Pace, says the number of Iraqi battalions able to fight independent of
American support has dropped in recent months, despite increased U.S. efforts.
Political pressure has grown in Congress for a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops
from Iraq. Guy Raz, NPR, July 1, 2007
---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11959162

US and British troops will need to stay another one
or two years in Iraq, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said. Mr Talabani was
addressing students during a visit to Cambridge University. Asked when the UK
and US should leave, he said: "I think in one or two years we will be able to
recruit our own army forces and say goodbye to our friends." BBC News, May 11, 2007 ---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6647865.stm

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki declared
Saturday that Iraqi forces could secure the country on their own “any time”
American troops decided to withdraw.Richard A. Oppel, Jr., "Maliki Says
His Forces Are Able to Secure Iraq," The New York Times, July 15, 2007
---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
Read that "his forces are able to secure Iraq by turning it immediately over to
Iran." I think Maliki wants Iran to secure a foothold before al-Qaida gets a
stronger foothold Iraq and its oil.

Great Tips for Saving Yourself and Your FamilyPut your car keys beside your bed at night. If you
hear a noise outside your home or someone trying to get in your house, just
press the panic button for your car. The alarm will be set off, and the horn
will continue to sound until either you turn it off or the car battery dies . .
. And remember to carry your keys (in your hand) while walking to
your car in a parking lot. The alarm can work the same way there..... Forwarded by Dick Haar (After attending a neighborhood watch meeting)
Jensen Comment
An added benefit is that the intruder will not know whether or not the intrusion
has been phoned into 911 and/or whether a loaded shotgun awaits inside the
house. A sign on the outside your door may also help: "Welcome to the
Gage's home. Come on in and meet 12 of our family."

Searching for

PowerPoint ppt files, Excel xls files, and other file types

Barry Rice tells us how to search for PowerPoint and other file types
July 15, 2007 message from Barry Rice
[brice@LOYOLA.EDU]

I just read in PC Magazine that
you can Google by file type by entering in the search box
"filetype: filetype and search term"

e.g., entering the following in the search
box returns 374,000 hits [quotes left out to minimize confusion]:

filetype:ppt accounting

I get 27,800 links to PowerPoint files when
I search for:

filetype:ppt accounting auditing

I get 969 links to PowerPoint files when I
search for:

filetype:ppt accounting derivatives

I get 15 links to PowerPoint files when I
search for the following, a couple of which, amazingly, are not Bob:

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
accounting derivatives" (without quote marks) into the
"Advanced Search" box it would not work properly. The phrase must be typed
in the "All the words" search box to work properly. This makes sense since
in retrospect --- Dahh!

My conclusion is that if you want your PowerPoint ppt files or other file
types like xls on some topic like "accounting derivatives" it is best to be
very careful to use that phrase in the title or in a listing of key words
for each PowerPoint file.

Companies go to great lengths to establish close
ties to professors who act as their on-campus talent scouts, sometimes investing
several years and considerable amounts of cash to deepen and maintain the
relationship . . . As companies compete fiercely for top talent on campus,
they're forging closer relationships with influential faculty members—and
they're not shy about spreading around the cash
"The Professor Is A Headhunter," Business Week, July 9, 2007 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_28/b4042055.htm

Direct payments to professors who offer recruiting
tips are rare, according to company and campus officials. Instead,
professors who receive corporate consulting fees or research grants
sometimes pass along promising names as part of their relationship with
companies hungry for talent. In one unusual case, Valero Energy Corp. (VLO )
recently provided gas cards to graduate teaching assistants at four Texas
universities in exchange for the names of undergraduates deemed suitable for
a company internship program. "There's a tremendous amount of money changing
hands," says Maury Hanigan, who runs a New York-based firm that scouts MBAs
for corporate clients. "It's all dressed up to pass the sniff test."

DODGING BUREAUCRACY
Schools have a range of policies on the issue. Seeking to avoid even a whiff
of favoritism, the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business
cautions faculty against offering potential employers any kind of recruiting
help before the company approaches students. (The guidelines do not cover
traditional letters of recommendation.) The University of Chicago's Graduate
School of Business lacks formal rules in this area, but Dean Edward A.
Snyder says he encourages professors to help make connections between
compatible employers and students. However, taking money for recommendations
would be improper, Snyder says, echoing a view commonly held by his peers.
"You'd be picking talent for one company, as opposed to picking talent and
matching across companies," he says.

Procter & Gamble Co. (PG ) was one of the first
companies to link college funding to recruiting. Nearly 30 years ago, the
giant consumer-products maker began funneling modest sums to more than 100
schools that P&G saw as likely to produce dynamic executives, says James
Mead, who oversaw worldwide personnel for the company in 1979, when the
practice began. Mead, who now runs the executive search firm James Mead &
Co., says P&G consolidated the number of schools where it recruited from 450
to 135 by identifying the business programs that produced the most managers
for the company. The payments helped P&G gain the favor of particular
schools and assured that on recruiting days, its interview slots were filled
with top students' names, Mead explains. P&G says it no longer makes such
payments and scaled back its financial support to higher education in about
2002.

Not long ago, it took more effort for companies to
build relationships with professors. In most cases, they went through the
campus career office, a process that some recruiters say can be bureaucratic
and time-consuming. But with detailed bios for most professors online
nowadays, companies have no problem bypassing the career centers and going
to the professors directly. "We can't prevent faculty from communicating,"
says Jody Queen-Hubert, who heads Pace University's Co-Operative Education &
Career Services. "And we can't prevent employers from contacting faculty."

In many cases, companies don't pay schools or
professors explicitly for recruiting help but establish more subtle
financial relationships. The accounting firm Ernst & Young maintains a list
of about 2,800 top accounting professors. E&Y financially supports academics
in a number of ways, including paying for what Ellen J. Glazerman, the
firm's head of faculty relations, calls "buyout time," when a professor
takes a semester off to develop a new course. Glazerman says some professors
routinely identify top performers for E&Y—sometimes even intervening on
behalf of job candidates who perform poorly in initial interviews.

General Electric Co. (GE ), which hires about 1,000
undergraduates and several hundred MBAs each year, has developed
relationships with professors at some 40 universities who, it says, help
identify up-and-comers. "We'll say, 'Hey, work on this with your PhD
candidates, and we'll help fund it,'" says Steve Canale, GE's recruiting
head. "As a by-product, we get insights into top [student] talent."

The National Association of Colleges & Employers
cautions against the mingling of financial support with more targeted
recruiting. Many schools adhere to its guidelines. Others have devised their
own rules. One is Darden. Its MBA Policy Committee has maintained guidelines
for more than a decade that instruct faculty to "refrain from making
evaluative statements about students, including any suggestion of those who
should be contacted or interviewed...prior to [recruiters] interviewing the
students in question." The purpose of such rules is to make the recruiting
process fair and open, says James R. Freeland, associate dean for faculty.
All recruiters get equal access to the same students, and students can talk
to all of the companies that are hiring.

Freeland recalls an incident in which a senior
faculty member persistently called the registrar's office, seeking student
grades and transcript information to pass along at a company's request. The
professor, still a member of the faculty today, was "trying to tell
recruiters who the best students were," says Freeland, who politely told the
professor to back off.

Faculty support for Darden's guidelines isn't
universal. "I think the policy is misguided in some ways," says Timothy M.
Laseter, a Darden professor and former partner at the consulting firm Booz
Allen Hamilton. Laseter recommended students to his former firm until being
informed by a colleague that doing so violated Darden's policy. While
Laseter says he now adheres to the school's rules, he argues that
restricting faculty matchmaking can hurt talented students. Laseter on
occasion does paid consulting work for Booz Allen and writes for its
quarterly journal, but he says that his informal recruiting for the firm
stemmed from loyalty, not from any financial incentive.

Not long ago, Laseter recommended a student named
Angela C. Huang, whom Booz Allen had initially overlooked after she applied
for an internship. Huang struck Laseter as perfect Booz Allen material: She
was intellectually curious and deeply analytical. At his urging, the firm
took a second look, and Huang now works as an associate in the Booz Allen
office in Cleveland. "Tim probably sees the best candidates for Booz Allen,"
says Peter Sullivan, who runs the firm's MBA recruiting operation. "And God
love him for it."

FRINGE BENEFIT
Many professors outside of business schools also participate in the annual
recruiting ritual. Doing the right thing in this setting is something that
Princeton chemistry professor David W.C. MacMillan says he often struggles
with. MacMillan has lucrative relationships with such big pharmaceutical
companies as Amgen (AMGN ) and Merck & Co. (MRK ) Some pay him consulting
fees. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY ), meanwhile, funds fellowships for
chemistry students at Princeton, to the tune of about $100,000 a year.

Many of the same companies welcome MacMillan's
recommendations on which students to hire, he says. MacMillan adds that he
encourages students to take jobs at companies that he believes would be a
good fit, rather than funneling top talent to the company that gave him his
most recent consulting gig or batch of research money. Amgen declined to
comment. Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb say recruiting is a secondary
benefit of research funding.

The relationship between talent-scouting professors
and corporate recruiters seems likely to deepen. Consulting fees are an
important part of many professors' incomes. What's more, recruiters operate
in a frenetic market for talent, where it's not unusual for top students to
receive multiple offers. And when companies have a sudden need for talent,
their methods can get very creative.

Exhibit A: Valero Energy. Last year the oil refiner
had more than 100 intern slots, up tenfold from the previous summer,
according to Dan Hilbert, who until recently was Valero's manager of global
recruiting. Less than two weeks before a career fair at the University of
Texas campus in San Antonio, the company still had a handful of openings.
Waiting until the fair would have meant losing candidates to rivals, says
Hilbert, who now runs his own consulting business.

In an April interview with Business Week,
Hilbert said he approached graduate student teaching assistants at UT-San
Antonio and three other schools in the area, offering them $25 gas
cards—"they call them 'beer cards,'" he says, redeemable at gas stations—in
exchange for the names of undergrad prospects. Persuading a candidate to
take an internship at Valero was worth another gas card, this time for $100.

It worked. According to Hilbert, seven graduate
assistants took the bait and turned over the names of their best and
brightest, even complying with his instructions to avoid students with
tattoos and facial hair. In a week's time most of the open internship slots
were filled. Valero says it does not endorse using gas cards as an incentive
to provide student information. Hilbert is unapologetic. "This is putting
allies in behind the fortress wall," he says. "We bent the rules to best
suit us."

Bruce L. Howard, UT-San Antonio's associate
director of employer relations, who oversaw the job fair, was surprised when
Business Week told him Valero had used graduate assistants for
recruiting purposes. Valero posts job openings for all students to see, he
says. But using insiders to pinpoint the top students? That, says Howard,
"is close to treachery."

Dress for SuccessThe NPD Group, the market research firm, goes so
far as to proclaim 2007 “the year of the dress.” In recently released data, the
firm says sales of women’s dresses surpassed $5 billion in the 12 months ended
in April — up 30 percent from the year-earlier period. By contrast, overall
sales of women’s clothing rose only 5 percent. Phyllis Korkki, "For Retailers, the Dress Is an ’07 Success," The New
York Times, July 15, 2007 ---
Click Here

Saving a Favorite Web Video Updated Free Version of RealPlayerThis week, I tested the newest version of RealNetworks
Inc.'s RealPlayer, which offers a distinctly useful feature: the ability to copy
any video from the Internet onto your PC, as long as it isn't protected by a
copyright. This player, which was just released in its beta (or testing) version
last month, is available as a free download from
www.realplayer.com . . . RealNetworks will
release a second version of this beta before the end of the year, including
options for transferring videos to portable players and Mac compatibility. For
now, the free download of this first version is smart, simple and fun to use.
Katherine Boehret, "Saving a Favorite Web Video: Updated RealPlayer
Copies, Organizes Clips Using a PC," The Wall Street Journal, July 11,
2007; Page D4 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118410628207262543.html

Why you may not want a new tiny laptop from Dell or ToshibaThe laptop is taking over from the desktop as the main
type of personal computer, but the most popular and economical laptops sold are
too large for maximum mobility. Making laptops that are tiny as well as powerful
is a tough design challenge. I've been testing two of the latest efforts to
crack that problem. The first is from Toshiba, a company that once dominated the
laptop world, but has since slipped badly. The other is from Dell, best known
for larger, clunkier laptops. Both machines are stylish and worked fine in the
tests, but each has flaws that might give a buyer pause.
Walter S. Mossberg, "These Two Laptops Are Small and Sleek, But Come With
Flaws," The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2007; Page B1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118420019968064051.html

Absurd CEO Compensation Once AgainRichard D. Fairbank is the chairman and chief executive
of Capital One Financial, the company whose ads ask, “What’s in your wallet?”
Lately, the answer for Mr. Fairbank has been as much as $2 million more every
week. . . . Now, with the 10-year options nearing their expiration, Mr. Fairbank
is gradually collecting his payback. Since early May, he has exercised more than
10,000 options every day and sold the shares, collecting as much as $3.4 million
before taxes each week. By the end of August, his (deferred)
pay for 1997 should have easily exceeded $60 million. Then he plans to start
cashing in the 1.2 million options he got in 1998. They are worth more than $50
million.
Patrick McGeehan, "What’s in His Wallet? Millions in Options," The New York
Times, July 15, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/yourmoney/15suits.html

Beijing can't clean up the environment, rein in
stock speculation, or police its companies. Why the mainland's problems could
keep it from becoming the next superpower.
"Broken China," Business Week Cover Story, July 23, 2007 ---
Click Here

When the bureaucratic machinery of China rolls into
action, it is a sight to behold. A mayor announces a plan to reclaim
hundreds of acres from the sea and build a massive industrial complex. A few
years later, busy factories and roads stretch as far as the eye can see,
families are living in thousands of new apartments, and 10,000 workers have
launched Phase Two.

This is the side of China that awes the outside
world. The mainland's extraordinary ability to mobilize people and capital
to accomplish daunting feats in record time is the reason it has averaged
annual growth of 9.5% for three decades. It is why China is an export
juggernaut in everything from T-shirts to TVs, has the world's
fastest-growing consumer market, and has amassed enough wealth to snap up
South American mineral reserves, IBM's (IBM ) PC division, and a big stake
in private-equity firm Blackstone Group. Will Beijing complete all of the
stadiums, expressways, and hotels in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics?
Count on it. It's also a decent bet China will achieve its goal of winning
the most gold medals.

Why, then, is it so hard for this same government
to crack down on exporters of dangerously tainted seafood, toothpaste, and
medicine, despite years of warnings by local and foreign experts? The
relentless headlines about unsafe products from China reveal a scary truth:
Probe even a little into the Chinese economic miracle and glaring
administrative failures abound. Product safety is just one aspect of
Beijing's inability to enforce needed regulation in everything from
manufacturing and the environment to copyrights and the capital markets.

The same Communist Party apparatus so proficient at
censoring the Internet can't keep peddlers in the heart of Beijing from
selling knockoff Callaway golf clubs and fake iPods, despite solemn promises
to Washington since the early 1990s about enforcing intellectual property
rights. Shanghai's stock exchange may be one of the world's hottest and may
boast a state-of-the-art paperless trading system. But it was a casino when
it opened in 1990 with eight listings, and after years of flaccid regulation
it's an even bigger casino with 1,118. Beijing proclaims all sorts of green
initiatives, yet heavily polluting new factories and coal power plants keep
going up. The party has talked for decades about building a social safety
net, yet as the working population ages the government isn't investing
nearly enough to head off looming crises in health care, education, and
pensions. China spends more than Japan on research and development,
according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD),
but its record of innovation is underwhelming.

"A CRITICAL POINT"
China observers dismiss these flaws as the growing pains of a nation making
a breathtakingly fast transition from a command economy to a free market.
But now it's becoming clearer that these and other structural problems
aren't being addressed. The same policies that have been so successful at
boosting the gross domestic product by developing new export industries and
public works projects, it turns out, undermine initiatives that might move
China's economy to a higher level. In its pursuit of growth at all costs,
China skimped on investments needed to provide basic affordable health care
and the regulatory machinery that can enforce environmental, safety, and
corporate governance regulations nationwide. Solving these shortcomings will
require a massive shift of the resources that are now being plowed into
capital projects. While Beijing would like to cool the economy, however, it
is wary of doing anything that would slow the high growth needed to generate
jobs for the millions of youth pouring into the workforce each year,
especially with a pivotal leadership conference scheduled this fall.
"China's economic development model was based on the simple concept of
expansion of production," says economist Chen Xiushan of People's University
in Beijing. "This model has reached a critical point."

A more intractable problem is China's power
structure itself. Although Beijing holds a monopoly on politics, local
Communist Party officials enjoy wide latitude over social and economic
affairs. They also have huge professional and financial incentives to spur
GDP growth, which they often do by ignoring regulations or lavishing
companies with perks. As a result, China has built a bureaucratic machine
that at times seems almost impervious to reform. Even if Beijing has the
best intentions of fixing problems such as undrinkable water and
unbreathable air, it is often thwarted by hundreds of thousands of party
officials with vested interests in the current system.

Beijing knows it must change course. China's $1.2
trillion in foreign reserves—the most ever amassed by any country—and
soaring trade surplus may seem like signs of strength, but they're actually
evidence of an overreliance on exports, weak domestic consumption, and a
primitive financial system. And a dearth of social services makes a widening
income gap between urban and rural areas politically explosive. Conjuring
ancient Confucianism, President Hu Jintao harps repeatedly on the need to
attain a "harmonious society," implying that China today is anything but. In
March, Premier Wen Jiabao labeled the economy "unstable, unbalanced,
uncoordinated, and unsustainable."

DYSFUNCTIONAL ADMINISTRATION
To their credit, Chinese officials have unveiled a blitz of corrective
measures. Regulators this year shut more than 180 illegal food producers. A
directive ordering government agencies to use legitimate software has helped
cut the share of pirated programs to 82% from 92% in 2001. Beijing is
launching new health-care initiatives, trying to tame the runaway stock
market, and passing stringent environmental rules. And in 2006 alone, nearly
30,000 officials were prosecuted for corruption.

If this reformist agenda fails, watch out. The
working assumption from Washington to Tokyo is that China is on a trajectory
to become a modern market economy and a responsible global citizen. But if
its problems persist, the world will have to keep living with a giant trade
partner that can't guarantee safe products, control piracy, or curb
pollution. China could keep growing rapidly for years, but a scenario of
dysfunctional administration calls into question whether it will really
become an economic superpower with world-beating corporations that challenge
the West in innovation—a Japan Inc. on steroids.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
In spite of the overwhelming problems of overpopulation, pollution, poverty,
corruption, energy shortages, information suppression, and red tape, China has
some huge advantages among world economies. Not the least of these advantages is
the fact that China has not burdened itself with entitlements ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm

Question
What do other nations know about taxes that the U.S. just cannot understand?

There's a trend here. At least 25 developed nations
have adopted Reaganite corporate income tax rate cuts since 2001. The U.S.
is conspicuously not one of them. Vietnam has recently announced it is
cutting its corporate rate to 25% from 28%. Singapore has approved a
corporate tax cut to 18% from 20% to compete with low-tax Hong Kong's rate
of 17.5%, and Northern Ireland is making a bid to slash its corporate tax
rate to 12.5% to keep pace with the same low rate in the prosperous Republic
of Ireland. Even in France, of all places, new President Nicolas Sarkozy has
proposed reducing the corporate tax rate to 25% from 34.4%.

What do politicians in these countries understand
that the U.S. Congress doesn't? Perhaps they've read "International
Competitiveness for Dummies." In each of the countries that have cut
corporate tax rates this year, the motivation has been the same -- to boost
the nation's attractiveness as a location for international investment.
Germany's overall rate will fall to 29.8% by 2008 from 38.7%. Remarkably, at
the start of this decade Germany's corporate tax rate was 52%.

All of which means that the U.S. now has the
unflattering distinction of having the developed world's highest corporate
tax rate of 39.3% (35% federal plus a state average of 4.3%), according to
the Tax Foundation. While Ronald Reagan led the "wave of corporate income
tax rate reduction" in the 1980s, the Tax Foundation says, "the U.S. is
lagging behind this time."

Continued in article

For all the talk about fiscal mismanagement at the
national level in India, there's a bright ray of hope: the states. And it's all
thanks to the Laffer curve. Tax reforms and other acts of liberalization at both
the central and state levels have boosted revenues -- just as Arthur Laffer's
famous tax rate-versus-revenue graph said they would -- and paved the way for
even more pro-growth policies. New Delhi can't get its own house in order, but
at least it's not hindering state-level development.
Paromita Shastri, "State Sense," The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2007
---
Click Here

Why don't they put it into plain English?
I nominate FAS 133 for every category of this award!

The Plain English Campaign monitors good and bad
language usage. They give out the Golden Bull Awards -- awards for "the worst
examples of written tripe" -- to people who offend their sense of
plainspokenness, as well as several other awards for clear language usage. This
year, they gave out seven Golden Bulls and 20 awards for clear language. One of
this year's seven Golden Bull recipients is Australian writer and academician
Germaine Greer. She won for a recent arts column in The Guardian (London), in
which she said, "The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a
discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesized manifold."
"Gobbledygook, Drivel, and Tripe," by Erik Deckers, The Irascible
Professor, July 10, 2007 ---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-10-07.htm

How to get more doctors and other health care providersAn influx of doctors lured to Texas by new limits
on malpractice lawsuits has overwhelmed the state board that screens candidates
for medical licenses, creating a backlog that forces many applicants to wait
months before they can start seeing patients.
"Influx of Doctors Overwhelms Texas Board," The Washington Post, July 9,
2007 ---
Click Here

Microsoft's Billion Dollar Attempted Fix
Why isn't the need for this surprising from a company that almost always
releases products in need of fixing before they're out of the box?

In the face of staggering customer returns of the
Xbox 360 console, the software maker announces a charge of at least $1.05
billion to address the problem In the quest for supremacy in next-generation
gaming consoles, Microsoft (MSFT) had a big advantage by releasing the Xbox 360
a full year ahead of competing devices from Sony (SNE) and Nintendo (NTDOY). But
hardware failures on the device are forcing Microsoft to cede some of its
hard-won ground.
Cliff Edwards, "Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Fix," Business Week, July 6,
2007 ---
Click Here
Also see
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19021/

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on July 13, 2007

SUMMARY: Microsoft Corp. said it will take a $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion
pretax charge to cover defects related to its Xbox 360 game console. Microsoft
executives declined to discuss the technical problems in detail, but a person
familiar with the matter said the problem related to too much heat being
generated by the components inside the Xbox 360s. An analyst in the
consumer-electronics industry, Richard Doherty, says the magnitude of the charge
Microsoft is taking, which represents nearly $100 for every Xbox 360 shipped to
retailers so far indicates Microsoft is concerned about widespread failures or
that the company is being extremely conservative in taking this estimated
charge. The charge will be taken in the quarter ended June 30, Microsoft's
fiscal year end.

QUESTIONS:
1.) Describe the accounting for warranty expenses. In general, why must
companies report warranty expenses ahead of the time in which defective units
are submitted for repair?

2.) Why must Microsoft record this charge of over $1 billion entirely in one
quarter, the last quarter of the company's fiscal year ended June 30, 2007?
Support your answer with references to authoritative literature.

3.) How are analysts using the disclosures about the warranty charge to
assess Microsoft's expectations for the repairs that will be required and for
the general success of this line of business at Microsoft?

4.) Consider the analyst Richard Doherty's statement that either a high
number of Xbox 360s will fail or the company is being overly conservative in its
warranty estimate. What will happen in the accounting for warranty expense if
the estimate of future repairs is overly conservative?

And Yet Another Reason to Be Annoyed With MicrosoftChris Pirillo leaned away from his webcam and pointed
to his printer/scanner/fax machine, which stopped scanning and faxing after he
installed Microsoft Corp.'s new Windows Vista operating system. Jessica Mintz, "Little Annoyances Still Big Vista Issue," PhysOrg,
July 14, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news103551764.html

From CCH
A National Map of Gas, Sales, and Cigarette Tax Rates Comparing All 50 States
---
http://www.cch.com/press/news/2007/stateconsumptiontax2007.pdf
Jensen Comment
Aggregations like this are somewhat misleading. For example, some states with
high sales tax exempt selected items like certain basic foods from grocery
stores. Unmentioned are the enormous car rental taxes that in some cities like
Kansas City are rip-offs to pay for new sports arenas. Unmentioned are the
differentials in hotel and restaurant taxes that not only differ between states
but often differ between cities. New Hampshire looks great on the above CCH map
and is proud of not having a sales tax on most items, including automobiles and
anything passing through a Wal-Mart checkout stand. But New Hampshire does have
an 8% tax on restaurant tabs. Liquor is relatively cheap in New Hampshire such
that people in surrounding states purchase liquor by the case our I-93 and I-95
exits that only exit to NH State Liquor Stores. I mean that these exits do not
go anywhere except for fill ups on booze. I've not seen a map comparing all 50
states on booze prices/taxes! Alcoholics, chain smokers, and Wal-Mart addicts
flock to New Hampshire from miles around for cheap booze, wine, smokes, and
anything found in the aisles of Wal-Mart and Sam's Clubs. But legislation
requiring funding is sometimes a joke in a low tax state like NH. For example,
our proud representatives recently passed a bill requiring quite a lot of money
to implement but only appropriated one dollar. I think we should send more
Yankees to DC.

Question
Where is the real blame in the fall from grace at GM, Ford, and Chrysler?

Part of it is union wages and unfunded benefits

A tip sent us to the blog of Dr. Mark J. Perry, professor of
economics and finance at the University of Michigan, who points out that hourly
union workers at the Big 3 make on average 57.6% more in a year than a
university professor with a Ph.D. Using figures from the automakers themselves,
Dr. Perry tells us that a union worker at Ford makes $141,020/year including
wages and benefits. A worker at General Motors makes $146,520/year and one at
Chrysler earns $151,720/year. According to another report he cites, the average
annual salary for a college professor in 2006 was $92,973, which happens to be
close to the $96,000/year a Honda, Nissan or Toyota worker makes in the U.S.
John Neff, "U of M Economics professor tackles tough question of UAW wages,"
Autoblog, July 13, 2007---
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/07/13/u-of-m-economics-professor-tackles-tough-question-of-uaw-wages/
Jensen Comment
Actually this piece is defense of auto worker pay and a put down of overpaid
professors. The bottom line conclusion is that a PhD teaching at a college has a
choice of becoming an autoworker. Why not take it?

Another, perhaps larger part, is quality of product
relative to the competition

"The Decline of Detroit: Don't just blame the UAW. The "Big Three" also
need to make better cars. ," by John Schnapp, The Wall Street Journal,
July 14, 2007; Page A7

It is true enough that the Japanese, European and
lately the Korean automakers who have scattered their new factories across
the lower Midwest and the Southland do not have many retirees to support.
Yet there is so far no evidence that the asserted $1,500 a unit advantage in
cost is being used by Japanese automakers in predatory pricing.

In fact, the sticker prices of their vehicles
are generally somewhat higher than comparable Detroit models. And beyond the
sticker prices, the various discount incentives of the domestics currently
average around $2,500 per vehicle. Toyota's average incentive is less than
half that amount and Honda's is zero.

In other words, the domestic automakers' net prices
are considerably lower, but they still continue losing market share.
Frustration over this recently led GM's North America chief Mark LaNeve to
urge each of his dealers, starting at Saturn, to buy a Honda Accord and a
Toyota Camry so they could show prospective customers that their own
offerings were fully comparable and certainly less expensive.

The ability of the leading Japanese automakers to
extract higher prices does enhance their financial resources. And these
resources have in turn helped underwrite their relatively short model
cycles, entry into previously unexplored segments like fullsize pick-up
trucks, and the initial losses of introducing novel products like the Toyota
Prius hybrid.

Even with all of this, however, it's instructive to
take a look back to 1997, Chrysler's last full year as a freestanding
enterprise. Carrying all of the same sorts of legacy-cost burdens complained
of today, and with the lowest labor productivity in its industry, the
company still recorded a healthy 4.8% net profit on sales, down from an even
headier 5.7% the prior year. GM in 1997 hit 3.8% and Ford 4.5%, not at all
shabby. And over the entire previous decade, which included a three-year
patch of market softness in the early 1990s, total annual return to
shareholders ranged from 12.2% at GM to 17% at Chrysler.

So what has really gone wrong over the last
decade?

Annual U.S. demand for cars and light trucks has
grown modestly -- but what has shrunk is the ability of the Detroit Three,
especially GM and Ford, to attract customers. Each of them will be selling
nearly a million fewer vehicles this year than in 1997. Most of the
financial crunch they face comes from lower unit sales trying to support an
increasing population of retirees, many added through cost-reduction
workforce cutbacks, plus additional benefits yielded to the UAW in the
intervening bargaining sessions.

So how, under these circumstances, can the Detroit
Three generate the resources they need for fostering what they hope will be
turnaround products?

They can cut the dividend payout to shareholders,
an initiative GM and Ford finally undertook last year. They can enter
collective bargaining by invoking the image of Armageddon, as they are now
doing. And they can sell off some of the family silver, which they are also
doing -- at GM this has included DirecTV, control of the company's finance
arm, and spinoff of its partsmaking albatross, Delphi. Ford has undertaken
extensive mortgaging of its real estate, has dumped Aston-Martin and is
seeking an acceptable price for Jaguar and Land Rover; ultimately it will
probably be forced to unload even Volvo.

A major overhanging question, though, is whether
the Detroit Three can obtain some form of governmentally brokered relief
from their retiree obligations. Currently they aren't explicitly asking for
it but they aren't exactly not asking either.

Not quite asking usually comes in the form of
elaborately staged Washington events in which the CEOs show off their latest
future-tech prototypes, reiterate their dedication to alternative power
systems, praise clean air and have heart-to-hearts with the president. So
far this president has applauded the prototypes, wished them well, but has
not yet been afflicted with the weepies about legacy-cost burdens.

Even if the UAW were to offer substantial
concessions, they are unlikely to provide more than mild, short-term
therapy. Success in the auto business means bringing products to the
showrooms that are hits with buyers. And hitmaking is a seemingly lost art
in Detroit since Lee Iacocca's last burst of Chrysler winners in the
mid-1990s.

Meanwhile the newly Democratic Senate has passed an
omnibus energy bill that would require the average fuel economy of new cars
and light trucks to improve from the current 25 miles per gallon to 35 mpg
by 2020. An auto industry trade association has already launched a
scare-mongering advertising campaign warning motorists that if the mandate
passes people might not be able to find the vehicles they want to buy.
Hometown heroes like Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. John Dingell have employed all
the tools at their considerable command to apply the brakes, but it seems
probable that the House will ultimately follow the Senate's lead.

But a 35 mpg mandate will surely not shoehorn
motorists unwillingly into tiny clown cars like Mercedes's European money
loser, the Smart. Nor is it likely to affect occupant safety or even
performance. It will involve broader availability of hybrids, already well
underway, and application of incremental technologies like turbocharging,
continuously variable transmissions and variable valve lift engines.

It will also oblige the automakers to sell
Americans on high-tech, high-performance, high-efficiency and very durable
diesel engines -- engines which, by the way, they already sell in Europe,
and which attract as much as 70% of car buyers in venues like France with
$7-a-gallon gasoline prices.

The overriding challenge, though, for the Detroit
Three remains neither their cost burden nor Congressional fuel economy
activism. Rather it is overcoming their continued inability to win in the
marketplace.

A decade ago, before any of the recent red ink
began to flow, the stewards of these giant enterprises had ample resources
to compete. Events have proven that they didn't use them very effectively.
In 1996-97, with all of the same cost burdens now bemoaned, Chrysler -- for
one -- made itself the world's most profitable automaker, generating rates
of profitability roughly the same as Toyota does today.

Continued in article

Forecasting Power of Implied VolatilityIn this paper the authors examine460 of the S&P 500
firms to demonstrate that: (1) implied volatility is a better forecaster of
realized volatility than historic volatility or GARCH models and (2) the
information content of implied volatility significantly decreases with
liquidity.
Jonathan M. Godbey and James W. Mahar, "Forecasting Power of Implied
Volatility," July 2007 ---
http://www.westga.edu/%7Ebquest/2007/volatility7.pdf

An English Lord Convicted of Big Time FraudA federal jury convicted fallen media tycoon Conrad Black and three of his
former executives at Hollinger International Inc. Friday of illegally pocketing
money that should have gone to stockholders. Black, 62, was convicted of three
counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. He faces a maximum
of 35 years in prison for the offenses, plus a maximum penalty of $1 million. He
was acquitted of nine other counts, including racketeering and misuse of
corporate perks, such as taking the company plane on a vacation to Bora Bora and
billing shareholders $40,000 for his wife's birthday party.
"Conrad Black Convicted of Fraud," NPR, July 14, 2007 ---
Click Here
Read the longer NYT account (more history) at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/14/business/14react.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

On a winter afternoon four years ago, Hollinger
International Inc.'s directors met with the company's chief executive,
Conrad Black, for an especially busy board meeting.

Gathered around a mahogany table in a boardroom
high above Manhattan's Park Avenue, eight directors of the newspaper
publisher, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and Jerusalem Post, nibbled on
grilled tuna and chicken served on royal-blue Bernardaud china, according to
two attendees.

Marie-Josee Kravis, wife of financier Henry Kravis,
chatted about world affairs with Lord Black and A. Alfred Taubman, then
chairman of Sotheby's.

Turning to business, the board rapidly approved
a series of transactions, according to the minutes and a report later
commissioned by Hollinger. The board awarded a private company, controlled
by Lord Black, $38 million in "management fees" as part of a move by Lord
Black's team to essentially outsource the company's management to itself. It
agreed to sell two profitable community newspapers to another private
company controlled by Lord Black and Hollinger executives for $1 apiece. The
board also gave Lord Black and his colleagues a cut of profits from a
Hollinger Internet unit.

Finally, the directors gave themselves a raise.
The meeting lasted about an hour and a half, according to the minutes and
two directors who were present.

The boards of scandal-plagued companies from Enron
to Tyco have been heavily criticized for lax corporate governance and poor
oversight. The board of Hollinger -- a star-studded club with whom Lord
Black had longstanding social, political and business ties -- is emerging as
a particularly passive watchdog. Hollinger directors openly approved more
than half of the transactions that allowed Lord Black and his colleagues to
improperly siphon more than $400 million from the publisher, according to a
company investigation overseen by former Securities and Exchange Commission
Chairman Richard Breeden.

High Society

Mr. Breeden's 500-page report, which was released
earlier this month, gives a detailed picture of a board that functioned like
a high-society political salon, while neglecting its oversight
responsibilities. Lord Black worked hard to win his directors' loyalty,
giving to their charities and holding dinners in their honor. As the scandal
unfolded, director Henry Kissinger even tried to negotiate with the company
on Lord Black's behalf.

In a sharply worded letter, the New York State
attorney general’s office asked a health insurance company yesterday to halt
its planned introduction of a method for ranking doctors by quality of care
and cost of service, warning of legal action if it did not comply.

. . .

It asked the company to cancel its plan to release
the rankings in September, citing a furor over a similar program’s
introduction in Missouri in 2005. There, physician groups, including the
American Medical Association, said the cost rankings primarily reflected the
cost of care to the insurer — not to patients.

Missouri doctors cited numerous objections to the
pilot program, which was halted and is being redesigned. For example, most
faculty members of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
were initially excluded from the quality rankings because university-based
care is generally more expensive. Doctors in major specialties were ranked
by cost alone.

Tyler Mason, a spokesman for UnitedHealthcare, said
the company had been meeting with the attorney general’s staff. He said: “We
share their commitment to looking at cost and quality. That’s exactly what
this is about. The assertion in the letter that sometimes higher cost equals
higher quality is actually not what experts nationwide find. Sometimes lower
cost means higher quality.”

Continued in article

Related Item of Controversy
Drug makers are exploring the possibility of tying pharmaceutical prices to
performance
"Pricing Pills by the Results," by Andrew Pollack, The New York Times,
July 14, 2007 ---
Click Here

Boston Scientific agrees to pay $195 million to settle claims related to a
potentially flawed defibrillator made by its subsidiary, Guidant.
Barry Meir, "Maker Settles Suit on Device for Hearts," The New York Times,
July 14, 2007 ---
Click Here

Accounting titan PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP agreed
to pay $225 million to settle audit-malpractice claims arising from the
criminal misdeeds of top executives at Tyco International Ltd., marking the
largest single legal payout ever made by that firm and one of the biggest
ever by an auditor.

The settlement applies to claims from both Tyco
investors, who had filed a class-action lawsuit against the accounting firm
in federal court in New Hampshire, and Tyco itself. The agreement was
disclosed Friday by PwC, Tyco and the class-action investors.

Tyco's involvement in the PwC deal followed on its
agreement in May to settle for $2.98 billion claims brought against it by
the same class-action plaintiffs -- removing a cloud of liability that
shadowed the conglomerate as it split into three publicly traded companies.
As part of that agreement, Tyco allowed investors to pursue its own claims
against PricewaterhouseCoopers, while Tyco would pursue claims on behalf of
shareholders against former executives, including former Chief Executive L.
Dennis Kozlowski.

Attorneys for Tyco investors said the settlement
marked a victory for shareholders. The $225 million payout "sends a message
to accounting firms" and will act as a "deterrent to future situations like
this," according to Jay Eisenhofer of Grant & Eisenhofer PA, who represented
investors in the case. Tyco declined to comment beyond saying that the
agreement had been filed.

The PwC settlement ranks among the top 10 legal
payouts made by accounting firms related to work on behalf of one company.
Ernst & Young LLP's $335 million settlement in 1999 related to work for
Cendant Corp. remains the biggest-ever payout by an auditor.

As a percentage of the overall settlement reached
by the company and other parties -- an important metric looked at by
accounting firms -- the PwC deal represented a payout on its end of about 7%
of the total. That is generally in line with payouts by accounting firms,
which tend to range from 5% to 15% of total payouts.

While the Tyco case was one of several corporate
scandals that rocked markets earlier this decade, it is somewhat unusual in
that the malfeasance revolved around compensation issues involving top
executives. That contrasted with the kind of bankruptcy-inducing fraud seen
in many other scandals such as those at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. In
June of 2005, a jury convicted Mr. Kozlowski, and Mark Swartz, Tyco's former
chief financial officer, of grand larceny, conspiracy and securities fraud.
Both are serving prison sentences in New York.

While PwC stood by its work, the firm's position
was potentially undermined when the Securities and Exchange Commission in
2003 barred Richard P. Scalzo, the firm's lead partner on Tyco's audits from
1997 to 2001, from audits of publicly listed companies. The SEC didn't
accuse him of deliberately covering up faulty accounting at Tyco, but said
he was "reckless" for not heeding warning signs regarding the integrity of
the company's management. Mr. Scalzo didn't admit or deny wrongdoing.

Although the PwC settlement with Tyco will have to
be approved by class-action investors, and some could drop out to pursue
claims individually, the deal mostly brings to a close one of the biggest
legal issues for PwC. Other high-profile cases the firm has outstanding are
suits related to its work for insurance titan American International Group
Inc. and computer maker Dell Inc.

The Butler Did It, Really and TrulyGraham J. Lefford, a former butler to American Idol
creator Robert Sillerman, has agreed to a $66,200 settlement in an
insider-trading case. The Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Lefford
with trading on information he allegedly obtained from faxes sent to Sillerman
in 2004, when Sillerman was closing a deal to buy a stake in Elvis Presley's
estate.
Alan Rappeport, "A Whodunnit in the Hamptons," CFO.com, July 10, 2007 ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/9465232?f=rsspage&x=1

Efficient vs. Adaptive Markets (and a Joke)
"Classic" finance theory says that markets are efficient (that prices
reflect all available information). However, real-world data reveals a lot
of patterns that seem to contradict market efficiency - like the small-firm
and value effects, post-earnings announcement drift, momentum effects, and
so on.

One competing approach to the Efficient Markets
Hypothesis is the "Adaptive Markets Hypothesis," or AMH for short (a term
coined by Andrew Lo at MIT). It says that inefficiencies like the ones above
can exist, but that market participants search them out and eventually
arbitrage them away until the profits from using these patterns get too
small to be worth the effort. So, in essence, it says markets are efficient
after all, but in an evolutionary sense.

I'm agnostic about which approach is correct. The
AMH has a lot to recommend itself because (according to Grossman & Stiglitz)
if there aren't some inefficiencies, there isn't any incentive for market
players to gather information (which makes markets efficient). The G&S paper
alkways troubled me, and the AMH provides a partial answer.

I just came across a great illustration (HT: Barry
Ritholtz) that I'll use in class the next time I teach about market
efficiency and "anomalies" like the value-glamour effect:

Scene One —
Efficient Markets Hypothesis An economics professor and a grad student are
walking along the sidewalk, and the grad student spots a twenty dollar bill
on the sidewalk. He says, “Hey professor, look, a twenty dollar bill.” The
professor says, “Nonsense. If there were a twenty dollar bill on the street,
someone would have picked it up already.” They walk past, and a little kid
walking behind them pockets the bill.

Scene Two —
Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, Part 1

An economics professor and a grad student are
walking along the sidewalk, and the grad student spots a twenty dollar bill
on the sidewalk. He says, “Hey professor, look, a twenty dollar bill.” The
professor says, “Really?” and stoops to look. A little kid walking behind
them runs in front of them, grabs the bill and pockets it.

Scene Three —
Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, Part 2

An economics professor and a grad student are
walking along the sidewalk, and the grad student spots a twenty dollar bill
on the sidewalk. He says quietly, “Tsst. Hey professor, look, a twenty
dollar bill.” The professor says, “Really?” and stoops to look. He grabs the
bill and pockets it. The little kid doesn’t notice.

Scene Four —
Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, Part 3

An economics professor and a grad student are
walking along the sidewalk, and the grad student spots a twenty dollar bill
on the sidewalk. He grabs the bill and pockets it. No one is the wiser.

Scene Five —
Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, Part 4

An economics professor and a grad student are
walking along the sidewalk, and the grad student is looking for a twenty
dollar bill lying around. There aren’t any, but in the process of looking,
he misses the point that the professor was trying to teach him. The
professor makes a mental note to not take him on as a TA for the next
semester. The little kid looks for the twenty dollar bill as well, but as he
listens to the professor drone on decides not to take economics when he gets
older.

Read the whole thing at The Aleph Blog. Once you
read it, look around the blog a bit. Although the author (David Merkel) is
relatively new with his blog, he's been in the finance game for a while, and
his stuff seems to be right on target - it's interesting, technically
correct and very well written. And not too many blogs pull off that
combination.

A
new pollby
Zogby Interactive may not
cheer professors. A majority
of the public believes that
political bias by professors
is a serious problem and
doubts that tenure promotes
quality.

To critics of the professoriate, the poll is
but more evidence of the gap between
academics and the public, but some experts
on public opinion about higher education
have questions about the value of the new
findings.

The poll was conducted this month through an
online survey of 9,464 adults, and has a
margin of error of +/- 1 percent. A Zogby
spokesman said that the poll was conducted
by the polling company itself, and was not
sponsored by any group.

More than 58
percent of those polled believe that political bias is a
somewhat serious or very serious problem.

There are
sharp divisions by party lines (73.3 percent of Republicans
view the problem as very serious, while only 6.7 percent of
Democrats do), gender (46.8 percent of men view the problem
as very serious, compared to 32.1 percent of women) religion
(57.9 percent of those who are born again view the problem
as very serious, while only 17.6 percent of Jews do), and
those who shop at Wal-Mart (56.7 percent of those who shop
there weekly believe the problem is very serious, while only
17.6 percent of those who never do think that).

Fears That Public Disclosure of Teaching Evaluations Attract Students to
High Grading InstructorsA new Missouri law requires public colleges to put some of
the information from student reviews of professors online for students to see
when picking courses,The Columbia Daily Tribune reported. Some
faculty members fear that the law will encourage students to look for easy
graders, but others note that unofficial Web sites already create such problems.
Inside Higher Ed, July 13, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/13/qt

What's left to be done at Duke is taking action
against the Group of 88. This group is made up of Duke professors representing
more than a dozen academic departments at Duke who took out a large newspaper ad
that constituted a rush to judgment about the guilt of the three accused
lacrosse players. The ad: (1) publicly demeaned the players (their own students
about whom they are supposed to care), (2) castigated the players for their
actions (as the Group of 88 presumed those actions to be) and, (3) called for
the lacrosse players to simply confess to their presumed misdeeds.
Charles F. Falk, "What'll Be Done About Duke's 'Group of 88'? July 7, 2007,"
The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2007 ---
Click Here

The 88 Duke University faculty members who took
out a hysterical ad, supporting those local loudmouths who were denouncing
and threatening the Duke students, have apparently had nothing at all to say
now. Not only did many Duke University professors join the lynch mob
atmosphere, so did the Duke University administration, which got rid of the
lacrosse coach and cancelled the team's season, without a speck of evidence
that anybody was guilty of anything.
Thomas Sowell, "The Duke Case's Unfinished Business," RealClearPolitics,
June 19, 2007 ---
Click Here

Duke Reaches Settlement With Players Duke University has reached an undisclosed
financial settlement with three former lacrosse players falsely accused of rape,
the school said Monday. Duke suspended Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty and Dave
Evans after they were charged last year with raping a stripper at an off-campus
party. The university also canceled the team's season and forced their coach to
resign. ''We welcomed their exoneration and deeply regret the difficult year
they and their families have had to endure,'' the school said in a statement.
''These young men and their families have been the subject of intense scrutiny
that has taken a heavy toll.'' The allegations were debunked in April by state
prosecutors, who said the players were the innocent victims of a ''tragic rush
to accuse'' by Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong. He was disbarred
Saturday for breaking more than two dozen rules of professional conduct in his
handling of the case. The New York Times, June 18, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Duke-Lacrosse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Questions about iPhone?
Can you physically remove the included AT&T SIM card from the iPhone and replace
it with another AT&T card or one from another wireless carrier?
And how can you replace the sealed-in battery?

Q: Can you physically remove the included
AT&T SIM card from the iPhone and replace it with another AT&T card
or one from another wireless carrier?

A: Yes, and no. The
SIM card, which carries the iPhone's account information, can be
removed by inserting a paper clip into a tiny hole at the top of the
phone. However, Apple says that if you replace the included card
with one from another carrier, like T-Mobile in the U.S., or Orange
in Europe, the phone won't work. According to Apple, some non-iPhone
AT&T cards may work, but some may not.

It's possible that
hackers will figure out a way to override this lock on other
carriers' SIM cards. But, as of now, the iPhone will work
only with AT&T. Even overseas, at least until Apple does
deals with foreign partners, you won't be able to use SIM
cards from other carriers. The iPhone will work overseas,
but you will have to roam with AT&T and pay high charges.
For instance, according to an AT&T spokesman, if you make a
call in Europe, it would cost $1.29 a minute. It would cost
99 cents a minute if you are on one of AT&T's $5.99 per
month international plans.

Q: Since the iPhone battery
is sealed in and can't be easily replaced by the
user, what happens when it dies? Will you have to
buy a new iPhone?

A: No,
but you will have to send the phone to Apple, or
drop it off at an Apple store, to have the battery
replaced. The battery is covered during the phone's
one-year warranty period. After that, replacing the
battery costs $79, plus $6.95 for shipping, and
takes three business days. Details are at
apple.com/support/iphone/service/battery/.
Some small companies may
eventually offer to do this for less, or in less
time, as they have for the iPod.

One twist:
because a phone is a necessity, Apple is offering
loaner iPhones for $29 while your phone's battery is
being replaced, or for the period of any other
repair on the iPhone. You will have to switch the
AT&T SIM card from your own phone to the loaner, and
then back again. Details are at
apple.com/support/iphone/service/faq.

In addition,
Apple warns that all the data on your iPhone will be
wiped out during a battery replacement, but notes
that it can easily be restored by simply syncing
again with the iTunes software on your computer once
you get it back with a fresh battery. That's
because, whenever you sync your iPhone with iTunes,
it backs up the data on the phone. You can also use
this method to fill your loaner iPhone with your own
data.

Textbook
Publishers Scrutinized By CongressThere's an
interesting short article in today's
Chronicle of Higher Educationabout a
briefing by textbook publishers. Congressional staff members pelted
company officials with questions about the high costs of college
textbooks and asserted that the publishers did not have students'
best interests in mind during a briefing on Capitol Hill on
Tuesday.But the publishers said they offer professors hundreds of
books to choose from for a specific subject, varying in cost from
only $30 to upwards of $100, and in some cases even let the
professor purchase certain chapters of a book that will not be
wholly used. Data offered by both sides about the amount students
pay for textbooks varied from $644 to $900 a year. Congressional
staff members, many of whose children are college students,
complained about the frequency of new editions of text books that
students have no choice but to purchase. Publishers described new
online products that they contend will be more effective and less
costly than traditional printed textbooks,
but in general, these staffers seemed cautious about the efficacy of
online learning tools.
The University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog,
July 11, 2007 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Learning a new language can be daunting, but this
handy application can make this process a bit friendlier. With ProVoc, users
can download existing vocabulary sets for English, French, German, Italian,
Spanish, Danish, and dozens of other languages. After that, they can run
through these words at their leisure on their computer or their iPod for
convenience. Finally, the site also includes a FAQ section that answers any
number of topical questions about the application. This version is
compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.3 and newer.

In an age where spyware and other such vexing
problems are fairly ubiquitous, it can be a relief to know about different
free applications that can help with such pesky matters. With this latest
version of SUPERAntiSpyware, visitors can take advantage of features like
complete hard drive scans, the removal of various spyware and adware
threats, and their process interrogation technology which locates threats
anywhere on a given operating system. This version is compatible with
computers running Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista.

"Robotic Farmer: Automated weeding could eventually reduce the use
of herbicides," by Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT's Technology Review, July
11, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19036/?a=f
Jensen Comment
My wife has one of these but he keeps pulling the flowers and missing the weeds.

Hope for new Parkinson's therapyHope for new Parkinson's therapy Scientists have
discovered a protein which may help to slow, or even reverse
symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's destroys nerve cells that produce
the brain chemical dopamine, causing movement and balance problems. Finnish
researchers found the new molecule can prevent degeneration of these cells - and
help damaged cells start to recover. Their paper, featured in Nature, showed
symptoms eased in rats given injections of the protein. Current anti-Parkinson's
drugs do not stop nerve cells from degenerating and dying, and their effects can
be patchy and short-lived. The researchers, from the...
"Hope for new Parkinson's therapy," BBC News, July 14, 2007 ---
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/health/6266498.stm

How to Live Past Age 100A new project to partially sequence the genomes of
100 people age 100 or older could shed light on the genetic variations that
allow some people to stay healthy decades beyond the average life expectancy.
Dubbed the Methuselah Project, the endeavor will serve as a test bed for a new
approach to sequencing developed at the Rothberg Institute, a non-profit
research center in Guilford, CT. About 1 in 7,000 people live to be 100, many of
them spry well into their 90s, but the reasons for their good health remain
largely unknown. "One of the women we'd like to look at is over 100, and up to
two years ago, she was still playing tennis," says Jonathan Rothberg, founder of
both 454 Life Sciences, a sequencing technology company based in Branford, CT,
and the Rothberg Institute. "My dream is that we will find [genetic variations]
that are enriched in this population that are protective." Emily Singer, "The Secrets to Living Past 100," MIT's Technology Review,
July 10, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/19028/
Jensen Comment
She still may be playing tennis, but she's mainly trying to meet boys so she can
get invited to the forthcoming prom on May 14, 1915.

China Not the Sole Source of Dubious FoodAt a time when Chinese imports are under fire for being
contaminated or defective, federal records suggest that China is not the only
country that has problems with its exports.
Andrew Martin and Griff Palmer, "China Not the Sole Source of Dubious Food," The
New York Times, July 12, 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/business/12imports.html?ref=business

Chronic Fatigue SyndromeClues in the blood Researchers at the University of New
South Wales (UNSW) believe that blood may hold vital insights into what is
happening in the brain of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
PhysOrg, July 7, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news102940694.html

New risk factors discovered for Alzheimer's disease
A recent study in Journal of Neuroimaging suggests that cognitively normal
adults exhibiting atrophy of their temporal lobe or damage to blood vessels in
the brain are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Older adults showing
signs of both conditions were seven-times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s
than their peers. PhysOrg, July 7, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news102949768.html

This is the best show-business
autobiography to date, bar none, written by a man who for many years
was one of only three directors in Hollywood (the others: Cecil B.
DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock) whose name meant as much on a marquee
as any star's. The life of Frank Capra (1897-1991) is a dazzling
American success story, filled with more peaks than plateaus. But by
the time the three-time Academy Award-winning director was 64, "the
Marquis de Sade had taken over the movie industry," he writes, and
"the kind of people I once ate for breakfast were maneuvering me out
of pet projects I wanted to do and out of the studio I had helped
build into a major company." So Capra called it a day. Regrettably,
for us. What he has to say about his time in the sun is filled with
all the verve and intrigue of a great mystery novel.

Apparently no one ever wrote more memos,
with carbon copies, than producer David O. Selznick (1902-65). The
memos flew out of his office at an alarming rate, whether he was
pondering the casting of "Gone With the Wind" ("Would Warners give
us a picture a year with Errol Flynn if we give him the lead?") or
telling Ingrid Bergman how much makeup to use. Deftly assembled by
Hollywood historian Rudy Behlmer, "Memo From David O. Selznick"
shows us how the obsessively hands-on Selznick was able to produce
so many outstanding movies--in addition to "Gone With the Wind," he
was behind "Dinner at Eight," "Nothing Sacred" and "Rebecca." It
also makes clear why people ran screaming whenever a messenger
showed up with another memo from DOS.

3. "Act One" by Moss Hart (Random House,
1959).

Moss Hart (1904-61) was one of the marvels
of Broadway and Hollywood, renowned as a playwright ("The Man Who
Came to Dinner," "You Can't Take It With You"), screenwriter
("Gentleman's Agreement," "A Star is Born") and Broadway director
("My Fair Lady," "Camelot"). He was also a famous wit, a devoted
friend and a man prey to deep depressions and mood swings. His
autobiography, "Act One," is a treasure-- an extraordinary treat and
the perfect answer for anyone who ever wondered why a person would
devote his life to such an unstable and erratic line of work. The
book covers only Hart's early years, before success kicked in, but
it tantalizingly promised two more volumes--which, alas, never came.

4. "Lion of Hollywood" by Scott Eyman
(Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Soon after MGM's big boss, Louis B. Mayer,
died in 1957, his name became a symbol of Hollywood hierarchy at its
most monstrous. I have always found this confusing, since many of
those who knew Mayer well and worked for him were fond of the man
who shepherded "more stars than there are in heaven." Scott Eyman's
excellent Mayer biography, "Lion of Hollywood," helps explain these
divergent views: In 1961, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther
wrote a book about Mayer ("Hollywood Rajah") with much negative
input from one of Mayer's two daughters, Edie Mayer Goetz, who had
been--ah!--left out of his will. Eyman's meticulously researched
book never panders to Mayer but does a great deal to balance our
perceptions of him. Along the way, we learn how a boy born in Russia
in 1882 joined a generation of refugees, glove salesmen and other
ambitious young men to start an American industry. The empire they
built was dictated much more by need and passion than meanness and
malice.

5. "The Grand Surprise" by Leo Lerman
(Knopf, 2007).

Leo Lerman (1914-94) never produced a movie
or directed a play, but as a writer, editor and critic at Condé Nast
he ran in glamorous circles. His celebrated friends included many
who were identifiable by just one name: Marlene, Tru, Jackie, Cary.
Lerman kept detailed journals tracking his social scamperings (even
before he could afford it, he entertained constantly). But in the
journals he also confessed to fears of failure and inadequacy
alongside those glittering souls. "The Grand Surprise" (edited by
Stephen Pascal), with an intoxicating mix of gossip, anecdotes and
character sketches, will be for many a grand surprise. Lerman writes
with just the right touch of brio and bite as he evokes a vanished
time.

Mr. Osborne, a Turner Classic Movies host, is at work on "80
Years of the Oscar," to be published next year by Abbeville Press

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

The other day a young person asked me how I felt about being old

I was taken aback, for I do not think of myself as old. Upon seeing my
reaction, he was immediately embarrassed, but I explained that it was an
interesting question, and that I would ponder it and let him know.

Growing Older, I decided, is a gift.

I am now, probably for the first time in my life, the person I have always
wanted to be.

Oh, not my body! I sometime despair over my body ... the wrinkles, the baggy
eyes, and the cellulite.

And often I am taken aback by that old person that lives in my mirror but I
don't agonize over those things for long.

I would never trade my amazing friends, my wonderful life, my loving family
for less gray hair or a flatter belly.

As I've aged, I've become more kind to myself and less critical of myself.

I've become my own friend.

I don't chide myself for eating that extra cookie, or for not making my bed
or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn't need but looks so avante
garde on my patio. I am entitled to be messy, to be extravagant, to smell
the flowers.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they
understood the great freedom that comes with aging.

Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until4 a.m.
and then sleep until -- ?

I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 50's and 60's and if
I, at the same time, wish to weep over a lost love...I will.

I will walk the beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body
and will dive into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying
glances from the bikini set.

They, too, will get old (if they're lucky).

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But then again, some of life is just as well
forgotten and I eventually remember the important things.

Sure, over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break
when you lose a loved one, or when a child suffers or even when a beloved pet
gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us strength and understanding
and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine and sterile and will never know
the joy of being imperfect.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turn gray and to
have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face.

So many have never laughed,and so many have died before their hair could turn
silver.

I can say "no," and mean it. I can say "yes," and mean it.

As you get older it is easier to be positive.

You care less about what other people think. I don't question myself anymore.

I've even earned the right to be wrong.

So, to answer your question, I like being older.

It has set me free.

I like the person I have become.

I am not going to live forever, but while I am still here, I will not waste
time lamenting what could have been, or worrying about what will be. And I shall
eat dessert every single day... (if I want).

Forwarded by Team Carper (Note that there currently is a drought in both the
southeastern region of the U.S.)

DRY SPELL IN ALABAMA

Alabama is so dry that:

The Baptists have started baptismal sprinkling in place of dunking.

The Methodists are using a wet wash cloth.

The Presbyterians are giving rain checks and,

The Catholics are trying to turn wine back into water.

Forwarded by Aaron Konstam

When oxygen Tech played Hydrogen U. The Game had just begun, when Hydrogen
scored two fast points And Oxygen still had none Then Oxygen scored a single
goal And thus it did remain, At Hydrogen 2 and Oxygen 1 Called because of rain.
--

Forwarded by Auntie Bev

Stephen Wright Humor

1. Can an atheist get insurance against acts of God?

2. One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.....

3. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

4. If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys
and apes?

5. The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the
bad girls live.

6. I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the
self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

7. What if there were no hypothetical questions?

8. If a deaf person swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap?< BR>
9. If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is
it considered a hostage situation?

10. Is there another word for synonym?

11. Where do forest rangers go to "get away from it all?"

12. What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an
endangered plant?

13. If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?

14. Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

15 Why do they lock gas station bathrooms? Are they afraid someone will
clean them?

16. If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless or naked?

17. Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?

18. If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to
remain silent?

19. Why do they put Braille on the drive-through bank machines?

20. How do they get deer to cross the road only at those yellow road signs?

21. What was the best thing before sliced bread?

22. One nice thing a bout egotists: they don't talk about other people.

The word moodle is an acronym for "modular
object-oriented dynamic learning environment", which is quite a mouthful.
The Scout Report stated the following about Moodle 1.7. It is a
tremendously helpful opens-source e-learning platform. With Moodle,
educators can create a wide range of online courses with features that
include forums, quizzes, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and surveys. On the
Moodle website, visitors can also learn about other features and read about
recent updates to the program. This application is compatible with computers
running Windows 98 and newer or Mac OS X and newer.

AECM (Educators)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/AECM is an email Listserv list which
provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software
which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the
college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and
peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets,
multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base
programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc

CPAS-L (Practitioners)
http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of
all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an
unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments,
ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed.
Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L
or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for
a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional
accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or
education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo
(Practitioners)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA.
This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ
initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.